Asking Erin Hogan to choose her favorite film is like asking her whether she prefers to study Iberian or Latin American films—both of which she researches and fell in love with as an undergrad. The real answer is that Hogan’s favorite film is whatever film she is studying at the time. For her new book, Patriarchy’s Remains: An Autopsy of Iberian Cinematic Dark Humour (2024), she capped the list at 14 films between 1958 and 2018, whose characters must deal with the death of the male head of household. Hogan uses the visions of 14 diverse directors to study cinematic dark humor through a feminist, biopolitical, and socio-economic inequality lens.

“My work is pretty transversal, not exclusive to writing books about one director, one creator, one film, or one novel. I enjoy analyzing multiple sources and finding the patterns across texts. In this case, I focus on films with dark humor,” said Hogan, a professor of Spanish. Dark humor blends humor with grim topics like death, violence, crime, and social dysfunction through wit, irony, or satire. 

“I’ve always been interested in dark humor. When I explain to my students why I study a wide range of texts, films, and languages—Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, and most recently, Galego, the language of Galicia in Northwestern Spain—it always comes back to the joy of learning. I encourage students to ask themselves what they want to explore, learn, or know more about, and then to pursue it.”

Spain’s cinema 50 years later

The question Hogan pursues in Patriarchy’s Remains is how and why the legacy of Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist, repressive, and violent dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, continues to impact Spain’s work toward democracy—even 50 years after his death on November 20, 1975. 

“Patriarchy’s Remains has two meanings. One refers to the on-screen corpse of the patriarch and the other to the persistence of patriarchy in Spain today,” writes Hogan in her book. She draws parallels between the families in the films—who must figure out how to live after the patriarch they depended on dies or is killed—and Spain’s citizens, who are still working to understand what a functioning democracy looks like.

“In critiquing Spanish politics, I aim to highlight how Spanish democracy could better serve its people by heeding the protests of its own citizens, on and off screen,” writes Hogan. “Patriarchy’s Remains reveals persisting inequities in post-Franco Spain to shine a light on the disenfranchised children of democracy who grieve for the unfulfilled promises of greater civil liberties and improved quality of life.”

Interested in learning more about Iberian or Latin American film? Hogan is the co-founder and co-curator of CineMaestro an open-access collaborative digital project designed to promote audiovisual literacy and intercultural competencies through the study and teaching of the cinemas by Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx directors.